Exit Tickets as Formative Assessments

Exit tickets allow you to breathe for a couple of minutes before your next class period starts. 

G. FAITH LITTLE
Initiative Director, 21st Century Learning

An exit ticket is like an Instant Pot. You hear about how great it is — it saves time, it’s simple, it’s flexible, and it doesn’t need many ingredients. It seems to be a staple tool at this point, so you pick one up and start using it. So it goes with exit tickets. When we start using them, it may be because of both convenience and necessity. They’re quick and easy, and they allow you to breathe for a couple of minutes before your next class period starts or you need to switch over to the next subject you’re teaching.

Exit tickets also provide a supportive rhythm to your class. They signal to kids that they will be transitioning soon, and this is invaluable to many students — especially if they struggle with change during their school day. Exit tickets provide a natural way to move from one space into the next, figuratively (if students stay in the same classroom) and literally (if students move to a new room). 

Sometimes that’s as far as we get with using exit tickets. It feels like enough, especially at the start of the school year or in the first year of your teaching career. But we can improve our use of exit tickets by taking them from simple (and valuable!) classroom tools and morphing them into invaluable formative assessments. 

“The power of exit tickets lies not only in informing instructional decisions — it includes the public acknowledgment of students' ideas and making adaptations of lessons, based on these responses, transparent to students (Marshall 2018). Importantly, exit tickets can also give voice to students who are otherwise silent in class, including English language learners and students "on the margins" of classroom life, and can draw your attention to who is being served in which ways, giving you critical information for shaping your practice to enhance equity and inclusivity.” 

— Exit Tickets: Understanding students, adapting instruction, and addressing equity (source)​

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What is an exit ticket? 

Backing up for a minute, let’s define an exit ticket. An exit ticket is a task that typically requires a short response from students. Teachers use exit tickets after an activity or learning period, and it can literally be the ticket to exit the room at the end of a period or a way for students to exit a part of the lesson. Exit tickets are not graded. Because they are not associated with a grade, students take on very little risk and can be honest about what they do and don’t understand, and may be more likely to ask questions they wouldn’t on a graded piece of writing. 

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Using exit tickets as formative assessments

Exit tickets can be used in any subject area at any grade level as formative assessments to provide teachers with authentic data, in real time. 

“To be effective, an exit ticket should have specific prompts for students and take only about five minutes to complete. Students can record their responses on index cards, sticky notes, notebook paper, or online (e.g., Google Forms, Padlet, Schoology, etc.). Ideally, student responses inform the next stages of learning by highlighting whether teachers should clarify ideas, reteach them, extend them, offer practice, introduce new ideas, or restructure future instructional activities (Marshall 2018).”

— Exit Tickets: Understanding students, adapting instruction, and addressing equity (source)​

Making exit tickets your own means designing (or using templates) for short responses that you can read fairly quickly. This can be as simple as a sticky note on which students respond to a prompt with a few words or a What, So What, Now What chart. 

What	So What	Now What
What happened?	What does that mean?	Now what will you do with this information?

​​At the end of a day, class period, or activity, you can engage in a quick cycle of inquiry with the data. 

1. Sort the data based on your own criteria from the lesson or for your specific students.

• Example: students who demonstrated they understand the concept, students who demonstrated they somewhat understand, and students who provided no evidence of understanding.

2. Examine each set of data. What do you notice? What needs attention?

• Example: a third of the students mentioned key terms from the lesson. 

3. Identify areas that need to be taught, retaught, or further investigated.

• Example: need to revisit primary colors

4. Adjust your next lesson to accommodate your findings.

• Example: start tomorrow’s lesson pairing students to share their knowledge

5. Revise your next exit ticket (if needed)  if you see that your prompt isn’t yielding useful data.

• Example: “Did you learn what osmosis was?” didn’t show me what they knew, only if they thought they learned the concept. Revise to an open-ended prompt.

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​Using exit tickets as formative assessments is a promising practice that can be quick and can also support deep and differentiated learning in your classroom. Share with us your exit ticket practice below. Similar to Instant Pots, when you learn new ways to use them, it’s fun to share your findings with others!